About Me

Thursday, 25 February 2010

I've been spending most of my time finishing the gun. But now we need to wrap it up. And i am happy with it anyway, so we should get moving on to the next steps...Pete finished the tracking for one of the main shots.The clip is where i pick up the gun and start shaking it ( shooting).

Witht the movement all tracked and put into maya, we could now see the first test of matchmoving.This is what that looked like.

We are very happy with the result! It definately gave us a good chuckle, but to be serious it is what we wished for and we can actually see this all coming together and looking really cool.

Ive finished texturing the gun. To be honest it could have been a bit better and more realistic, but we need to move on to the next stage which is rendering.Which means that we have to animate the gun (prescicion is crucial!!) and then render it. The rendering is, as always, gonna take a LOT of time, so we need to get that out of the way so that we can spend the remaining two weeks composoting, keying, maskin, tweaking, frustrating and maybe succeeding, all to make it look as good as possible.

Thursday, 18 February 2010

We spent a whole day in the greenscreen studio, getting the footage we needed.First we had an induction on how to use the greenscreen (its a big dangerous process to get it down from the ceiling). Then we got the rest of the day to spend in the studio.Thankfully we were able to check the footage right away on my laptop, so we could do a couple of tries, adjust the camera and then try again until we got it right.There were only 5-6 shots needed, but we have tons of bloopers that are quite funny (Pete actually falls over himself when he kicked me).It was a lot of fun. And for the first time i have used a professional greenscreen. So hopefully the footage will be good and it will all look good in the end!

Wednesday, 10 February 2010

This project is all about nice n glossy special effects. We Teamed up in groups of 2 to 3. I am in a group with Pete and Simon.We spent some time beforehand to figure out what COULD be done in accordance to what we would LIKE to make.In the morning meeting, where we all pitched our ideas, i realized that all of the groups had really good ideas and i cant wait to see them all come together!

Our idea was initially to have me and pete come in to a totally white environment, and then (in the video) gradually "create" everything around us. Sort of like a breakdown, but as part of whats happening.Then we wanted to have me and pete turn against each other and start fighting with various cg created weapons. Im talking guns, bombs, throwing weapons, even vehicles!The oucome of the fight was never planned though.

BUT since this would require WAAAAY to much work, we shortened the whole thing down to one clip each of the effects we wanted to show.So there will be one major establishing shot to show mattepainting background with 3d objects (a big bridge), one shot of us fighting to show interaction between real footage and cg environment, and then a shot of me picking up a big cg gun from the ground and then shooting pete. This is probably the trickiest of the techniques were using, but with georg´s expertise, we´ll get there soon!

My job was to create the "box" which we were to use as a tracking reference for the cg gun. And also to make the actual cg gun in Maya.The Box i first wanted to make out of cardboard boxes and spraypaint them in one solid color. But i figured a paper box would be too weak, so i made one out of shelves i bought.So i hacked up the shelves and assembeled them with handy screws and spraypainted the whole shebang in florescant green.

The handles i created was covered in black tape so we could keep them instead of keying them ou and replacing them. That would add a lot of work.But when the thing wa finished i got way to excited, picked it up and started shaking it ( i was pretending it was a machine gun ratatatatta), and then i broke one of the handles....But it wasnt a big problem since we had one handle left. Still very stupid mistake...

We hve done a lot of testing with The Box, but havent quite gotten the results we need. So while Pete was struggling with that, i was working on the cg gun.Its almost finished, but i have a very essential part of it left - texturing.It may the most important part of convincing realism to the audience.This is what it looks like so far...